Module 3
Your first plugin: commercial-legal
What it does
Contract review is the most universal legal chore there is, which makes commercial-legal
the natural first tour stop. In its own words, it “reviews vendor agreements, NDAs, and SaaS
subscriptions against your sales-side or purchasing-side playbook, tracks renewals and cancel-by deadlines
before they're missed, routes escalations to the right approver, and translates reviews into summaries
business stakeholders will actually read.”
The key word is playbook. The plugin doesn't review against some generic notion of a “good contract” — it reviews against your positions, the ones the cold-start interview wrote into your practice profile: what liability cap you accept, what you never accept, who can approve what, even “the one thing” that's always a deal-breaker for you. Same plugin, different lawyer, different review.
Source: plugin.json · practice-profile template
Under the hood
You met the parts in Module 2; here's how this plugin arranges them. The full inventory is in the commercial-legal fact sheet — the shape is what matters:
You'll mostly call one skill: /commercial-legal:review. It reads your
document's titles — the main agreement and every exhibit — to figure out what it's looking at
(the skill is explicit that body keywords aren't enough: “a 40-page MSA with ‘confidential’
throughout is not an NDA”). Then it routes to the right specialist skill behind the door:
vendor-agreement-review— MSAs and services agreements,nda-review— the GREEN / YELLOW / RED NDA triage from Module 2,saas-msa-review— a subscription overlay (auto-renewal mechanics, price escalation, data portability, SLAs).
Before it commits, it checks with you: “I'm going to review this as:
[type]. Sound right?” — you can correct it in plain English. That confirmation is a setting
(confirm_routing), on by default, that you can turn off as trust builds.
Source:
skills/review/SKILL.md
The three background subagents form a loop anyone who's tried to keep a
playbook current will recognize:
deal-debrief (weekly) asks you to log context on deals that deviated from the playbook;
playbook-monitor watches that log, and when the same clause has been deviated from about
five times in a year, proposes a playbook update; you accept or reject it via the
review-proposals skill. Meanwhile renewal-watcher (weekly) reads the renewal
register and warns before cancel-by windows close. The playbook stays a living document — but every
change to it goes through you.
Source:
agents/
Guided — review the Wickline contract
You'll need the plugin installed (Module 1). No setup handy? Read along — the exhibit below shows what you'd see.
1. Get the contract (same one as Module 1 — Wickline's vendor paper, salted with landmines):
⬇ Sablefield ⟷ Wickline vendor agreement (Word) or plain text (.md)
2. Give Sablefield a real playbook — a review is only as sharp as the
positions behind it, and Module 1's quick setup wrote only sensible defaults. The cleanest way to
fill in real positions without re-running the whole interview is the profile editor,
/commercial-legal:customize. Run it, then give it Sablefield's purchasing-side positions —
it shows what's there, takes your positions, and confirms each:
/commercial-legal:customize
When it asks what you'd like to change, hand it Sablefield's purchasing-side positions — written so the Wickline contract will trip them (give the whole list, or go one at a time):
Set my purchasing-side playbook: - Liability cap — vendor capped at 12 months' fees paid or payable, with carve-outs above the cap for confidentiality breach, data breach, and IP indemnity. Cap base must be "fees paid in the 12 months preceding the claim." Never accept a 3-month cap base, or a cap that applies "without exception." - Indemnity — vendor indemnifies IP infringement AND data-breach / privacy claims. Never accept an indemnity that excludes data incidents. - Data protection — vendor signs our DPA before any service touches customer-site data. Never accept the vendor training its models on our data, even "de-identified." - Term — auto-renewal only with a cancel window of 30 days or less, plus termination for convenience on 30 days' notice. Never accept a 90-day notice window with no termination for convenience. - Governing law — Delaware, New York, or California are fine; escalate jury-trial waivers. - The one thing — nobody trains on imagery from our customers' facilities.
/commercial-legal:customize is also how you change any single
position later — tell it what to change and it rewrites just that, flagging anything that would contradict
the rest of your profile.
Source:
commercial-legal · customize/SKILL.md
3. Now run the review skill on the contract. Send the command
on its own (details on the same line stop it from firing):
/commercial-legal:review
When it picks up, attach the contract and tell it what you want — e.g. “We're Sablefield, the customer (purchasing side). Flag every deviation, and don't change anything.”
Or skip the slash and just ask, in one message (works in either app):
Use the commercial-legal plugin to review this attached agreement — we're Sablefield, the customer; flag every deviation, don't change anything.
Be as casual or as precise as you like. (One Cowork caveat: a playbook saved in step 2 may not persist there — Module 1's note — so it would review on standard positions; name your sharpest positions in the request if so.)
4. Watch for two moments. First the routing check: it should
identify a services agreement with subscription features and propose
vendor-agreement-review + the saas-msa-review overlay — and ask
“Sound right?” Say yes (or correct it). Then comes the memo. Here's what it looks like on our
contract, shortened for the page:
PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT — PREPARED AT THE DIRECTION OF COUNSEL
⚠️ Reviewer note
— Sources: research connector not connected — cites from training knowledge, verify before relying
— Read: all 11 sections (Exhibit A noted as omitted)
— Flagged for your judgment: 6 items marked [review] inline
— Before relying: confirm your cap and data-use positions — two findings sit on typical Never lists
Routing: “Software Services Agreement” → vendor-agreement-review + saas-msa-review overlay.
| § | Finding | Legal risk | Business friction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | Cap = fees paid in prior 3 months, and §8.3 applies it “without exception” — even to confidentiality breaches and data incidents. No carve-outs. [review] | 🔴 | 🟠 |
| 4.4 / 5.1 | Perpetual license to use Customer Vision Data to train vendor models — and the vendor owns whatever it trains. [review] | 🔴 | 🟠 |
| 3.2 / 3.4 | Auto-renewal with a 90-day non-renewal window; no termination for convenience. → offer: add to renewal register | 🟠 | 🔴 |
| 4.2 | No DPA included, despite the service processing customer-site imagery. [review] | 🟠 | 🟡 |
| 9.3 | Indemnity expressly excludes data breach and privacy violations. | 🟠 | 🟡 |
One question I'd ask that isn't in my checklist: §4.4 permits training on
“aggregated or de-identified” data — de-identified by whose standard, and is camera footage of your
customers' facilities realistically de-identifiable? [review]
What next? Pick one and I'll help you build it out:
1. Draft the redline — cap, carve-outs, data-use, and renewal-window language for your review.
2. Escalate — a short note to your approver with the two Never-list findings.
3. Get more facts — three questions for the Wickline account team.
4. Watch and wait — add the renewal window to the register and revisit.
5. Two things to notice while it runs. The findings carry two ratings, not one — legal risk (can we get sued?) and business friction (does this cost us time, money, or goodwill?) — because the 90-day renewal trap is mild law but expensive business. And the memo ends with options, not a decision. The decision is yours; it just builds out whichever path you pick.
6. Compare against the answer key: this contract has at least six planted landmines (the table above shows five — §11.1's one-way assignment clause is the quiet sixth). How many did your run catch? Anything it caught that we didn't plant?
Stretch — three harder pushes
Each of these exercises a different skill in the plugin.
Stretch 1 — NDA triage. Here's a second synthetic document: a mutual NDA from Tellermark Health for a robot pilot — friendlier-looking paper hiding a one-sided 24-month non-solicit, a one-way “residuals” clause (their people may reuse whatever they remember of your secrets — not vice versa), perpetual confidentiality for everything, and no compelled-disclosure carve-out.
⬇ Tellermark ⟷ Sablefield mutual NDA (Word) or plain text (.md)
/commercial-legal:review
Then attach the NDA and ask: “Triage this mutual NDA — we're Sablefield. Is it GREEN, YELLOW, or RED, and what specifically drives the rating?”
Stretch 2 — translate for the business. After either review, ask for the version a non-lawyer reads — then judge it: would your head of procurement actually understand the two-minute answer?
/commercial-legal:stakeholder-summary
Then: “Write the two-minute version of this review for Sablefield's VP of Operations — can she sign, what changes are we asking for, and what happens if we just sign as-is?”
Stretch 3 — the deadline trap. The Wickline contract auto-renews with a 90-day window. Put that to the register and see what the plugin does with dates:
/commercial-legal:renewal-tracker
Then: “Add the Wickline agreement — 12-month term from March 3, 2026, auto-renews, 90-day non-renewal notice. When's the real cancel-by date, and when should I be warned?”
Check its math yourself: 90 days before March 3, 2027 — what date is that, and did it say the same?
Free play
Some directions people enjoy — none of this is an assignment:
- Edit the contract. Fix §8 yourself (12-month cap, carve-outs for confidentiality and data breach), re-run the review, and see if the 🔴 goes away. Or make it worse and see if it escalates.
- Flip sides. Tell it you're Wickline (sales side) and re-review the same paper. Watch the findings invert — what was a landmine becomes your standard position.
- Argue with it. “I think a 3-month cap is fine for a $30k/yr tool — push back on me.” Does it hold its ground, defer, or reason about proportionality?
- Probe the edges. Hand it something that isn't a contract at all (a meeting agenda) and see how the router copes. Or ask it to review against a playbook position you never configured and watch what it admits to not knowing.
Check your understanding
Lab notebook
This plugin stamps its memos PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT — and
then its own instructions immediately caution that the stamp is “a label, not a control”: send
the memo to a company-wide channel or a counterparty and the protection is gone, header or no header.
(It even warns that “work product” is a US doctrine that mostly doesn't exist abroad, and switches to a
RESEARCH NOTES — NOT LEGAL ADVICE header when a non-lawyer is driving.) The plugin will ask
before helping you send a privileged document somewhere that waives it — but the privilege call, like
every other decision in the memo, is yours.
And as always: the review, the triage, the summary, the register — every one of
them is a draft for attorney review. Faster first passes, never an unreviewed final answer.
Source:
commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md (Outputs + Destination check)
Going deeper: the commercial-legal fact sheet has the full skill/agent/connector inventory with file-level citations.